Sunday, June 9, 2013

Last year, we took lines from Sunday comic strips and made a collage out of those words for a series of entries. But, since those entries were very time-consuming, and we thought we might get the wrath of Bill Griffith, the cartoonist of "Zippy the Pinhead," among others, we decided to try the same concept in another way.

Our absolute favorite comic strip of the week was "Brevity," which made fun of TED Talks, and hence we have English education maverick Kenneth Robinson, a frequent TED contributor, in the middle image.

Other highlights included Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean," which dealt with two pizzeria guys talking about their high school days. Batiuk was in our region over the weekend as he visited our friends at Chapel Hill Comics in Chapel Hill, NC. The strip is carried in "The Roanoke Times," the newspaper of my hometown of Roanoke, Va.

We also loved the conversation between a hermit crab (pictured top) and a Galapagos turtle in "Sherman's Lagoon" about how 'cool it is to be single,' though (SPOILER ALERT) at the end of Jim Toomey's comic strip this week, once senses one or both of them will seek out the underwater version at E-Harmony. Of course, one can see such undersea creatures at The National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland (come on, give us a free admission for the plug, we'll make the 7.5 hour drive in return!).

Lastly, "Pearls Before Swine," which is even in the "News and Advance" in Lynchburg, Va. (we love to make fun of Lynchburg here), featured the fate of Norwegian lemmings, creatures known to commit ritual suicide in droves every year.

Ironically, we are featuring the usually right-wing comic strip "Mallard Fillmore" because they made fun of Greek yogurt (the executive editor of this blog Tilly Gokbudak is a Turkish-American").

Here are ten of our favorite comic strips of the week (in alphabetical order as opposed to the more subjective order of preference); we found this comic strips in "The Washington Post" and the online version of "The Denver Post:"

1. "Brevity"

2. "Dog Eat Doug"

3. "Funky Winkerbean"

4. "Garfield" *

5. "Lio"*

6. "Mallard Fillmore"

7. "Overboard"

8. "Pearls Before Swine" *

9. "Rhymes with Orange" *

10. "Sherman's Lagoon"*

*-Comic strips featured in the Sunday print version of "The Washington Post"